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To celebrate the imminent
arrival of the year 2000, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts will present
from June 17 to October 17, 1999, the exhibition Cosmos: From Romanticism
to the Avant-garde. This is a huge topic, covering the myth of the New
Frontier from the nineteenth-century explorations of America, including
the Far North, to contemporary explorations of the solar system. The exhibition
consists of some 380 works from twenty different countries - paintings,
sculptures, drawings, books and decorative art objects - executed between
1801 and the present day. Alongside paintings of earth and the heavens will
be rare vintage and contemporary photographs (from Daguerre to NASA), as
well as observational instruments. The history of ideas, of art and science,
together with artistic movements from Symbolism to the avant-garde, are
tackled each in turn in order to illuminate these two centuries that have
left their stamp not only on our technology and aesthetics, but also on
our sense of spirituality.

The exhibition, organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine
Arts, is divided into seven themes: Nature and the Cosmos, The Promised
Land, The Voyage to the Poles, Beyond Earth; The Moon; Imaginary Cosmologies;
The Foundations: The New Jerusalem; and To Infinity and Back..

The
opening-up of the American West was a religious venture before becoming
a political one. This wilderness was seen as the Promised Land, and its
wonders, such as spectacular waterfalls, giant redwood trees and Yosemite,
were celebrated by painters like Frederic Edwin Church, Thomas Cole, Thomas
Moran and Albert Bierstadt and photographers such as Eadweard Muybridge
and Carleton E. Watkins. American painting, initially inspired by the European
landscape tradition, whether visionary and Symbolic (John Martin, J.M.W.
Turner) or Romantic (Caspar David Fnedrich, Carl Gustav Carus), began to
evolve little by little. The format became panoramic, and the sense of the
sublime gradually pervaded these depictions of the unpeopled West, shown
as a new Eden.

The search for new frontiers extended to the icy reaches
of the Arctic regions in the nineteenth century. This northern landscape
of colossal icebergs and limitless space, as well as the spectacular effects
of the aurora borealis, are depicted in the paintings of Frederic Edwin
Church, William Bradford and the watercolors of British naval topographers.
Later the Canadian artists of the Group of Seven, such as Lawren Harris,
would draw inspiration from the cold solitudes of the Canadian Far North.

The romance of polar exploration began to lose its attraction
towards the end of the century. Earth had been dealt with, and a new frontier beckoned: the moon.
From the astonishing pastels of Étienne Léopold Trouvelot
to late-nineteenth-century daguerreotypes and the photos taken by NASA's
Surveyor probes, the moon still exerts an attraction. The proof can be seen
in works by contemporary artists such as Claudio Parmiggiani, Mark Tansey,
Ilia Kabakov, Paterson Ewen and Joyce Wieland.

Astronomy's discoveries about the infinite depth of space
and the links joining mankind to the cosmos had a powerful influence on
late-nineteenth-century painters like Alfred Stevens and Van Gogh, and after
the turn of the century on artists as different as the Italian Divisionist
Pellizza da Volpedo, the Lithuanian Symbolist Mikolajus Ciurlionis and the
German visionary Wenzel Hablik.

In seeking to make the dynamism of the universe visible,
Italy's Futurists, including Giacomo Balla and Luigi Russolo, shared Robert
Delaunay's and Frantisek Kupka's fascination with the cosmos. The allure
of the heavens also gripped the imaginations of Soviet "revolutionary"
artists like Ilia Chashnik, Kazimir Malevich and Aleksandr Rodchenko, whose
works foreshadowed space stations.

From
the 1920s to the 1940s, many artists, among them Constantin Brancusi, Alexander
Calder and Joan Miró, drew inspiration from speculations on the origin
of the cosmos; they were followed in the 1960s by artists such as Yves Klein
and Lucio Fontana. Thanks to the Hubble space telescope, the far reaches
of the universe have come closer. The quest for the beginnings of creation,
and the conquest of space, as seen by artists of today like Vladimir Skoda,
George Segal, Vija Celmins, Thomas Ruff and Kiki Smith, complete the exhibition,
in the image of a universe that doubles back on itself.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a major catalogue,
available at the Boutique and Bookstore of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
It will be distributed in French by Gallimatd and in English by Prestel.
After the exhibition's presentation in Montreal, it will be shown at the
Centre de Cultura Contemporània in Barcelona, Spain. This project
has received funding from the Canada Council for the Arts and support from
the French Consulate General in Quebec City.